Re: Stay Puft Kim, Stay Puft

Re: No offline? Screw you guys, I’ll play with myself instead.

Given that I was able to play it last night with no issues whilst also pulling down some Linux ISOs from Usenet, and downloading from Steam (so my broadband was pretty maxed) I'd say that it only connects when it needs to update the Galaxy status (ie: when Hyperspacing to a new system or when trading in a station). Rest of the time ... no problems.

I got so sick and tired of their hard sell tactics for their 'value added' services (like their website builder). Eventually jumped ship when after a particularly obnoxious sales drone called from the USA to try to sell me the services yet again, whom I politely informed that I was not interested. Anyhow, I then found on my next invoice a charge for 12 months pre-payment for the website builder. Took me a further 2 months to get all the charges reversed and them to eventually transfer my domains and close my accounts.

Now with Vidahost and have never been more satisfied with a hosting provider. (And I'm paying less for three years domain registration and hosting with them than I was paying 1&1 per quarter).

Re: I'm not convinced

If you look at the images, the screw holes referred to are internal - for pcb mounting I would guess, so this makes it entirely plausible [note that they may not even be screw holes, but simple locating posts instead...

I wonder what sort of knock-on effect granting this patent would have for the likes of Steam for example - especially in light of the current German court case pending regarding the resale of digital copies of games on the Steam platform...?

“Apple’s continual improvement is thanks to both the iPhone 5 and older models attracting various customer groups," said Parlato, "from repeat Apple buyers, first time smartphone buyers and those coming from other smartphone brands”.

Re: Whatever the product, this will not entice me

Whether or not it works better than Siri is irrelevant. Until voice activation can work with 100% accuracy 100% of the time for 100% of its users it will remain nothing more than a curiosity and a toy ... on any device or platform.

And we pay our license fee because?

Maybe they should leave well alone.

I use JavaScript every single day in my job, and something about trying to shoehorn the language into a 'proper' application development language just strikes me as wrong.

Whilst I find it a very capable tool, it's purpose is, and has always been, to create small blocks of code that perform a single, simple function - not to develop a huge, full-on application consisting of thousands of lines of code. Surely we have much better languages already to achieve this, and as BlueGreen stated above, all this will do is further bloat the language and lead to more abuse of what it's original intended use.

IIRC the RNG for ERNIE (the premium bond computer) is a physical RNG. The old version I saw used two drilled spinning disks that were at a large potential difference. The time between electrons jumping from one disc to the other (visible as arcing) was used to generate the random digits.

Oh please...

Raphael Bousso, from the University of California Berkeley, told the Catholic News Service that what should be a generally hostile universe might "appear rather carefully tuned to us at first sight".

"Naively it looks like somebody was playing with a lot of dials and turning them exactly to the right places to end up with this large, complex-rich set of phenomena that we see when we look out the window and that, from a scientist's point of view, is a very bizarre situation to be faced with," he said.

... or, you know, perhaps, just maybe ... the fact that the Universe has been around for many billions of years before us and we evolved within it's confines means that rather than it being tuned just especially for US more that we're especially attuned to IT. After all, if our environment were completely hostile to us, we wouldn't have even got out of the starting blocks.